


The Dead Authors Fanfic: Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman

by trifles



Category: The Dead Authors Podcast
Genre: Bad Poetry, Gen, Historically Inaccurate, M/M, Meta, Metafiction, Podcast, Podfic, Poetry, Screenplay/Script Format, cheap references, historical allusions, sexual innuendo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 00:27:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8919430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trifles/pseuds/trifles
Summary: This fanfic is intended as entertainment for grownups, and to spread awareness of the Yuletide Rare Fandom Exchange. The Dead Authors Fanfic hasn’t been brought to you by 826LA, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for children ages 6 to 18, but if you wanted to contribute to them, that would probably be nice. And now, here’s the host of The Dead Authors Fanfic, Mr. H.G. Wells.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yasaman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yasaman/gifts).



**H.G. Wells:** Hello, reader, and welcome to the first chapter of The Dead Authors Fanfic. I am H.G. Wells, narrator of this conceit within a conceit. You may remember me as the author of The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and other quite definitely _science fictional_ works -- this opposed to certain other writers who won’t be mentioned here, whose names might happen to rhyme with _Booles Turn,_ and whose works might be summarized as _‘gosh aren’t giant squids neat’_.

Now you may not know this, but not only did I write _The_ Time Machine, but I also own _a_ time machine. With this machine I travel to the past and pick up authors of classic works, bringing them to the present day to be interviewed by yours truly. What makes me qualified to speak with these giants of literature? Two words: Time machine. As the kids these days say, _use it or lose it._

This installment is going a little outside our norm, not only because it _is_ fanfic instead of our usual podcast, but because we’re going to bring back two of our old guests, poets of equal fame and equal questionable sexual identity, American poet Walt Whitman and Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe!

 

**Marlowe:** Wells! What deviltry is this? Did I not plainly decree my intention to stay in the blessed woods and snowy breast of England, there to be quite probably a spy but definitely not a Catholic? You cur, you rapscallion! I demand some sweet drink if you plan to hold me long.

 

**H.G. Wells:** I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you found our first time around that much of a trial.

 

**Marlowe:** You insult me by mentioning _trials_. Did you know that after you left me to the tender grasp and yellowed nails of mine own time, I did make the error of mentioning this miraculous future to my kinsmen, and they put me in front of yet _another_ trial to _again_ determine whether I was an atheist? And so I did have to testify that during our interview I said I didn’t believe in God. Fie on you, false interviewer! You misquoted my words.

 

**H.G. Wells:** Not sure why you would tell them something I misquoted. But also -- not a misquote. You did in fact say that you did not believe in God.

 

**Marlowe:** Wells, you malodorous halyard.

 

**H.G. Wells:** Perhaps now would be a good time to introduce our second guest, Mr. Walt Whitman.

 

**Whitman:** Can time be considered good if it is not measured in the gentle swell of a man’s chest as it rises and falls in the bed beside me, a sweet breath stirring the air around my nethers in the bed that is the wide white fields of our great country, O traveler!

 

**H.G. Wells:** Not sure if there was a question in there.

 

**Whitman:** I saw a man who was brusque of cheek and firm of leg walking down the street. He was tall, lithe, handsome, tan, a son not yet a father but still not yet a son, of woman’s ilk had I a love for a woman such as he who was also yet the limpid jets of love that blow white-hot over the homes and the bodies and the trains and the arms and the furrowed brow of the humble fisherman of Massachusetts who sits with me daily in the sun that is my regard.

 

**Marlowe:** Ah! So you saw me then.

 

**H.G. Wells:** Wait, I’m sorry-- did the two of you meet already?

 

**Marlowe:** Verily, my friend, did you not mark the green room backstage?

 

**H.G. Wells:** We haven’t got a backstage -- this is all written out.

 

**Whitman:** We met, he and I, in the mind of the writer that saw us betwixt and betwined in the mallows that grow at the water’s edge--

 

**H.G. Wells:** Let’s just put a stop to that particular line, shall we? No need to get more metatexual than we already are. At any rate, we should get to the main part of our fic, which is!-- Perhaps you remember that during our original interview you both had certain views regarding the true identity of William Shakespeare.

 

**Whitman:** How can I call Shakespeare a poet as I am a poet, if he was a glovemaker’s son and I am the son of the earth and the sky and the great Mississippi and the mountains glorious and the body electric. I am the body of an earl, an earl of Oxford, the Earl of Oxford, the Oxford of earls, Oxford, earls, sex.

 

**Marlowe:** Shakespeare! That hack. Unless _I_ am Shakespeare. If it be so, then it is a truth that I will ne’er confirm, even unto the last dying breath that exits these lungs to speak the final lines of a play definitely written by me, for all the world’s a stage and we poor players--

 

**H.G. Wells:** Pretty sure that’s Macbeth.

 

**Marlowe:** Original title, The Maiden’s Holiday.

 

**H.G. Wells:** Right. So we’ve got Mr. Marlowe on one side claiming himself as the true author of Shakespeare’s works, and we’ve got Mr. Whitman on the other who, if I’m parsing this correctly, is going for a more Oxfordian theory of authorship.

 

**Whitman:** I sing a song of the bowed backs and supple skin of rowers on the water, possibly in Oxford but more likely the majestic swells of Boston’s mighty Charles River.

 

**H.G. Wells:** Leaving that aside! Since I am the owner of a time machine, I thought the easiest way to solve this was to go and pick up the man himself. Ladies and gentlemen, kind and patient readers, may I present the one, the only: Mr. William Shakespeare!

 

**Shakespeare:** Yo.

 

**Marlowe:** Hello, Will. Grasping onto my coattails again?

 

**H.G. Wells:** Did they have coattails in the Elizabethan period?

 

**Marlowe:** Verily. Take you a long-haired rabbit of some fine colour-with-a-u and comb it briskly for two and one fortnights until you have a bobble of fur that might yet be twisted into such threads of warmth and peace as the dew-sprinkled gods of Eros could wish upon any woman’s spindle. From there it takes but a weaving, a cutting of cloth, a piecing and a sewing such that the three Fates might envy of the work, a brief journey to about a century and a half hence and its fashions therewith, and lo you shall have a coat as fine as any a lord and gentleman might wish for, and from which this _two-brained tit_ could hang onto for a _dog’s age_.

 

**H.G. Wells:** Lovely. Mr. Whitman? I hesitate to ask what you think of our guest, but--

 

**Whitman:** The universe is a procession of men and women in measured and perfect motion. Is this the call of my country in my ear, is this the sight of the grain marching beneath the feet of he who stands before me, naked and unashamed and still yet beloved in the hand and the tight fingers and the kind of vigorous hand motions that makes man a friend of man as a mighty geyser makes the sky feel hot drops of liquid love across its face to fall ecstatic to the ground.

 

**H.G. Wells:** I… I think perhaps I’ve just allowed the reader to see something quite rude. Are you _propositioning_ William Shakespeare?

 

**Marlowe:** This cur? This varlet? This ass that defiles my words and claims them as his own? When there’s _me?_

 

**Shakespeare:** I’m down with it.

 

**Whitman:** Let’s sing this body electric, o captain my captain!

 

**H.G. Wells:** Oh dear… this is a first… two of our guests are-- yes, they’ve left the page and are heading off into the margins. It appears that I have my work cut out for me if I want to get everyone back to their proper times. I do however think that means that we’ve come to the end of our fic. Let’s give a round of applause -- or whatever your reading equivalent is -- to Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, and William Shakespeare!

My thanks to our guests for their time, and special thanks to Matt Gourley, James Adomian, and Ben Schwartz, _for no particular reason_. Join us again next time, when our guests will be Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard [part 3]. This fanfic was produced by no one in particular, and was written by never-you-mind, with special server space by Archive of Our Own.

Until next time, this is H.G. Wells saying _the show is over._ Kit-- any last words?

 

**Marlowe:** Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand…

 

**H.G. Wells:** I’ll take that as a no. Goodnight!


End file.
